Fatigue

A few months ago I began to feel exhausted and generally wretched all the time. Early in the afternoon I’ll feel a deep weariness sink into me. My legs will ache and I’ll feel as if I’m sinking into my chair. My thought will become fuzzy. I find it difficult to concentrate. What is this? Is it normal? Is this what it means to age? I’m only 34. I shouldn’t feel this way. Do I not exercise enough? Am I not eating the right things? Do I drink too much? Am I depressed? Is it stress?… Or is it something more frightening like cancer? For all the talk of embodiment these days, I can see why philosophers in previous centuries were so resistant to the body. It weighs one down. It is finite. It suffers. It gets sick. It gets fatigued. It distracts thought with appetites and passions. Next week I begin to swim.

 

Assemblage Theory, Complexity and Contentious Politics

I’ve already pimped his thesis in the past, but now that I’ve had the time to sit down and read it I would highly recommend Nick’s thesis on Deleuze for anyone interested in Deleuze’s ontology and complexity theory. Nick articulates Deleuze’s ontology with exceptional clarity, reading it in terms dear to my own heart– with respect to the problem of individuation –and articulates its relevance to social and political theory. One question that emerges for me is that of what theory must look like once we take seriously Deleuze’s thesis that only individuals exist (where the concept of an individual is to be conceived at different levels of scale, such that, for example, cities, nations, and various social systems are also individuals). That is, once we adopt this premise we can no longer advocate universal laws and generalities. N.Pepperell once told me that she does not believe assemblage theory is a theory. I got irritated at the time as is my custom when I’m enthusiastic about something, but in this I think she’s right insofar as the concept of assemblage is not yet a theory or an explanation of a particular field of individuation, of a particular individuation or phenomenon, but rather an ontological concept that precedes a theory. For example, Marx’s historical materialism stipulates that there are no essences of the human or society. This is a general ontological claim, not yet a theory. We have not yet proposed a theory until we engage in the arduous work of accounting for the specific regularities governing a particular socio-historical moment. Marx becomes a theory when he explains why the historical moment takes the particular form it does (i.e., when he articulates all the processes and contingencies by which particular subjects were formed, particular social relations came into being, and particular tensions or antagonisms developed) and when he envisions the immanent processes by which these historical moments are undergoing transformation. In short, what is required is not logos but immanent logoi, immanent patterns of (re)production internal to a phenomena, absolute specific to situations and their organization.

 

Identification and Community

Our Carl gives a nice analysis of the mechanisms of textual identification with respect to the issues I raised on style over at Dead Voles. There Carl writes:

At one level there’s absolutely nothing remarkable about this dynamic of text identification except the fact that all these smart people seem to think it’s remarkable. Every text from Dr. Seuss on up, difficult or not, has the charismatic potential to generate reverent reading communities that might be described as ‘priesthoods’. My own experience is with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian theorist who wrote about complex things quite clearly, all in all. There are a lot of pages of Gramsci, most of them in prison notebooks that he never had a chance to edit into a linear text, many of them on topics that very few people could care less about. This of course creates the opportunity for a mystery cult for those few who have virtuously read through all of it, sort of like the Kabbalah or the Hadith. Here are instances where the reading community in effect ADDS difficulty to the sacred text by digging out and canonizing every little detail, aside, and tangent. The characteristic assertion is that the plainish meanings of the core writings must be supplemented or even amended in light of these exclusive arcana. (Translation fetishists from the Qur’an to Weber and Foucault work the same way. Translations are not just workably second-best but unacceptable in comparison to the sacred revelation of the original.)

People choose these texts and these reading strategies for all the usual reasons they choose religions (and reject other religions). They may be born into them, or disposed toward them by cultural marking of the text. They may be seeking identity and collective effervescence in a community. The text may be culturally marked as normative or transgressive, enabling the effervescence of dominant or rebellious subculture identification. There may accordingly be a component of acceptance and/or rejection of authority, be it the father’s or the group’s. These are choices within structured fields of options and decision strategies. All of this falls under the sociology of what Weber called elective affinity and Bourdieu elaborated as the schemes of the habitus.

For some reason this makes me think of Virno’s discussion of fear in A Grammar of the Multitude. In the third chapter of A Grammar of the Multitude Virno argues that anguish/anxiety is one of the predominant affects of our time. I hope to write more on this later when I am not inundated with grading at the end of the semester and thoroughly exhausted. At any rate, as Marx and Deleuze and Guattari argued, one of the marks of capitalism is the manner in which it decodes all social relations and codes through processes of deterritorialization. By “decoding” Deleuze and Guattari do not mean the activity of finding the meaning behind some coded fragment of speech as intelligence officers and cryptographers do. Rather decoding is the process by which social codes are undone and destroyed.

 

Philadelphia

I’m off to Philadelphia to visit family for the next few days. Cheers all!

 

The Machine in the Man

This afternoon, as I gave my second lecture, I found my thought process a bit sluggish. Here and there I would stumble over a word, mispronounce something, or formulate an awkward sentence. Associations weren’t coming to the tip of my tongue as quickly as they often do. I had not yet eaten lunch and had had a very small breakfast, so the sluggishness of my thought process was literally a function of having no gas to run my engines. Yet consciously, phenomenologically, this sluggishness, this lack of alertness, all seemed to me to be a failure of my own will. That is, they felt as if they were my own doing. I am not sure what is worse… Blaming such moments on oneself, or being haunted by the momentary phantasm that none of these things are one’s own doing, that ultimately we’re a sort of machine governed by very complex cause and effect relations over which we have no ultimate control. In such moments a sort of nausea flows over me and I’m horrified by the thought that perhaps my sense that I direct myself, that I will actions, that I am an agent is nothing but an epiphenomenal illusion and that every thought I have, every emotion I experience, every feeling of failure and moral guilt I suffer, everything I seem to will is nothing but the ticking away of a very complex machine where I am ultimately absent. Can anyone not experience horror at the vision of the cap of one’s skull cut open, revealing that fiberous network of neuronal connections where electro-chemical reactions flash and burst without any centralized co-ordination, all the while realizing that that is you? What cruel creator would create a machine that is conscious of itself as an illusion? What accident of nature could produce such an abomination? Fortunately I quickly forget such horrifying phantasms and return to the reassuring thought that I’m somehow directing myself and am not simply an epiphenomenal mist arising out of a network of essentially random connections and processes.

 

Guattari: Molecular Revolution

Guattari’s Molecular Revolution is now available online for free.

via Continental Philosophy.

 

The Substance of Thought: Critical and Pre-Critical

The Theory Reading Group at Cornell University invites submissions for its
fourth annual interdisciplinary spring conference

The Substance of Thought: Critical and Pre-Critical

featuring keynote speakers Simon Critchley (The New School for Social
Research) and Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths, University of London)

Cornell University
Ithaca, New York
April 10th-12th, 2008
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg/conf2008.html

The last few decades have witnessed a struggle within continental
philosophy between those thinkers who accept Immanuel Kant’s “Copernican
Revolution” and those who refuse critical philosophy in favor of a
“classical” metaphysics that, in the words of Alain Badiou, “considers the
Kantian indictment of metaphysics…as null and void.” This conference will
consider the conflict between “critical” and “classical” or metaphysical
strains in contemporary thought. Has critical philosophy run its course,
as Badiou suggests? Or has Kant’s critical turn determined the horizon of
all future philosophical work? Or is there an alternative path?

We are interested in analyzing the contemporary division between thinkers
who prescribe a return to the pre-critical metaphysics of, for example,
Spinoza, Leibniz, or Lucretius, and those who continue to take up various
trajectories of Kant’s critical legacy. The former camp might include
Deleuze and Badiou as well as Negri and Althusser, while the latter might
include Adorno, Benjamin, Heidegger, and Derrida. We particularly wish to
encourage work that takes a stand on the conflict between the two camps,
as well as work that considers the implications of the conflict for the
arts and social sciences. The wide range of our inquiry includes
interrogations of the nature of critique, the fate of aesthetics, the
privilege accorded to immanence or transcendence, and the status of
materialism.

Suggested paper topics include (but are not limited to):

- transcendence and immanence
- Derrida and Deleuze
- negation and affirmation
- finite and infinite
- the rebirth of rationalism
- aesthetic ideologies
- quasi-, ultra-, immanent-transcendental
- the Althusserian legacy
- the one and the multiple
- the persistence of the dialectic
- the fate of aesthetics
- the return to Kant
- the future of the linguistic turn
- the question of critique
- futures of Marxism
- philosophies of experience
- univocity, equivocity
- the limits of representation
- the historical a priori
- the genesis of subjectivity
- the possibility of materialism
- affects, passions
- the role of the negative
- the new philosophy of science
- political ontology
- the return of nature philosophy
- radical Spinoza
- rhetoric and philosophy

The deadline for submission of 250-word paper abstracts for 20-minute
presentations is February 1, 2008. Please include your name, e-mail
address, and phone number. Please email abstracts to theory@cornell.edu.
Notices of acceptance will be sent no later than February 15, 2008. For
more information about the Theory Reading Group, visit
http://www.arts.cornell.edu/trg.

 

Great Moments in Historical Materialism– Grounds of Critique

I apologize for my general lack of engagement recently on Larval Subjects. This is not from a lack of desire to respond and engage. Last week my office computer decided to blow up and I’ve only had computer access at home as a result. In the morning I’m generally rushing about to get to class, while in the evenings I’m generally too exhausted to do much of anything beyond drinking a glass of wine. Couple this with being in the midsts of putting together two presentations, four forthcoming articles, and getting the index for the book together, and you can bet that I’m ready to shoot myself. Time has been at such a premium that I found myself irritated, this morning, at having to waste an extra minute to find a pair of socks. Not rational, I know. Hopefully the situation will be rectified soon.

I recently came across the following passage in Book One of De Rerum Natura:

A property is that which not at all
Can be disjoined and severed from a thing
Without a fatal dissolution: such,
Weight to the rocks, heat to the fire, and flow
To the wide waters, touch to corporal things,
Intangibility to the viewless void.
But state of slavery, pauperhood, and wealth,
Freedom, and war, and concord, and all else
Which come and go whilst Nature stands the same,
We’re wont, and rightly, to call by-products.
Even time exists not of itself; but sense
Reads out of things what happened long ago,
What presses now, and what shall follow after:
No man, we must admit, feels time itself,
Disjoined from motion and repose of things.

It is difficult to sense the full force of this passage. Or perhaps it is that we are today so accustomed to this thought that we do not tremble when confronted by these words. These truly are thoughts and words that make the world rumble, even if only expressed in a few verses. Lucretius distinguishes between properties and by-products. On the one hand, properties are qualities of a compound object (compound because it’s composed of atom and void) that cannot be disjoined from the object without that object being destroyed. Even though the weight of a compound object can be changed, it is not possible to separate weight from an object. One might object that wetness can be subtracted or disjoined from water when it turns into ice. However, the person that argues such a claim has failed to recognize that in transitioning from water to ice the atoms composing the compound have configured to form something new. Similarly, a new connected property here emerged: cold from ice.

Lucretius’ stunning observation– I’d be interested to see whether it was commonly made in antiquity, I cannot think of other examples off-hand –is that by-products are not connected to the object itself. Lucretius’ examples are clear enough: regardless of whether I have the property of wealth, poverty, slavery, freedom, or am in a state of war, or peace, I remain the same person. That is, were I to lose all my wealth, I am still this person who has lost all of his wealth. As such, these properties are not connected properties of my being. This might be more difficult to see in cases of war and peace until we recall Deleuze’s theory of sense, where senses like “battle” are not in the bodies in conflict, but hover above it as an incorporeal sense of the event. More concretely, we have learned this century that war is a speech act… And if we know this, especially in the United States, then this is because today we have many actions that are police actions, though qualitatively indiscernible from war at the level of how bodies are interacting.

Lucretius’ distinction between properties and by-products has implications that reach far beyond the examples he gives, and which are a central axiom of historical materialism. His examples of freedom and slavery are particularly telling. Freedom, slavery, are not natural features of physical bodies, but are rather a product of relations among bodies. That is, they are, according to this metaphysic, institutions. Many will recall that Aristotle had argued that non-Greeks and women are naturally inferior to Greek men, thereby treating this inferiority as a property of these bodies. Aristotle naturalizes social relations, thereby treating them as the natural order of things.

If Lucretius’ words cause the world to shake, then this is because this thesis belongs not only to the various social identities we might possess, treating them all as by-products rather than properties, but it also extends (without him saying so) to all social institutions as well. Being-a-king is not a property of the king, but is instead a by-product of being recognized as a king by his subjects. Gender relations between men and women are not the natural way of things, but the result of ongoing autopoiesis whereby both parties involved reproduce themselves in their gendered identities through their interactions with one another (without it being possible to say one group produces the identity of the other). Sexual identities are not natural properties, but are again by products of practices and institutions.

These concepts are perhaps familiar to us today– though I hear people making such claims on behalf of the natural all the time –so it is difficult to hear just how much they make the world rumble and shake. However, if there is one central function of the project of critique and historical materialism, this is to show the essential contingency of social institutions and identities… The way they are “by-products” or “accidents”, rather than properties. The activity of demonstrating the contingency of institutions is not an activity of “debunking” or falsifying. We might, for instance, show that rights are by-products or accidents of certain social organizations. This does not render rights false, just as it is no less the case that I am a professor because being-a-professor required a whole host of institutions from universities, places to teach, states, and my students acting towards me as a philosopher. Rather, if rights are by-products or accidents, then this is because they can fail to exist in certain bodies. This entails that perhaps we fight all the more vigorously for the existence of these by-products. Rather, in the activity of critique, in the activity of uncovering contingency, we render possibilities available, allowing us to counter-factually envision how other forms of life might come to be. The slave that comes to see the institution of slavery as a contingent by-product of his socio-historical setting rather than a natural property of his being also comes to envision the possibility of another life, another world. Perhaps we should begin with the premise that we’re all slaves. Perhaps this would paradoxically be the most affirmative position one could advocate. Sometimes the entire world is changed through a simple distinction, an incorporeal transformation, a concept, that then functions as a lens so potent it is able to concentrate light into fire.

 

The Alethetics of Rhetoric

A Disclosure

One of Heidegger’s central contributions to philosophy was his concept of truth as aletheia. Ordinarily truth is understood as a correspondence between a proposition and a state-of-affairs. For instance, the proposition “the sun is shining” is true if, in fact, the sun is shining. A key feature of this conception of truth is that the state-of-affairs to which the proposition refers is transcendent to the proposition, independent of the proposition, and exists in its own right regardless of whether or not the proposition is enunciated. The proposition in no way effects the thing itself. Another theory of truth treats truth as coherence. A proposition here is true if it coheres with a body or web of propositions as in the case, perhaps, of Hegel’s system.

For Heidegger, by contrast, truth is aletheia or the disclosedness or revealing of being. Lest I earn the condemnation of the Heideggarians, I will say upfront that I will not here do Heidegger’s conception of truth as aletheia justice, nor is it my intention to give a careful analysis of his claims. Rather, I wish to indicate how it might be of use in thinking certain rhetorical phenomena.

To claim that truth is aletheia or disclosedness is to claim that an entity must first disclose or reveal itself as a particular sort of entity prior any statements we might make about it. Perhaps this idea can best be elucidated by way of the human body. In encountering the body as a seat of action, an object of medical intervention, a sexual object, and so on, is the body disclosed or revealed in the same way? In living my body, there’s a way in which its physicality, its nature as a volume, flesh, a surface, disappears. Far from being an object like other objects in the world, there’s an invisibility about my lived body, a specific bodily intentionality, such that it is not my body that is the focus of engagement, but rather the destinations towards which I move and the objects with which I am engaged. My hand is not this geometry of flesh, bone, and sinew, but rather is a grasping that is entirely exhausted in this act of typing or this grasping of my coffee cup. To say that my lived body is “exhausted” in this act of typing or in taking hold of the coffee cup and drinking is not to say that it is fatigued, but rather that it disappears in these acts by virtue of the very activity of revealing the world that it is engaged in. It is the coffee cup that is disclosed, the words on the screen, the destination towards which I am moving, not the lived body itself. As such, the lived body is more a collection of vectors, trajectories, directions, illuminating the world independent of it, rather than a geometrical shape and configuration of flesh, bone, and sinew.

Read on

 

For the Trekkies

Tomorrow is the 40th Anniversary of Star Trek. What vision of social life did this show give us?

[I]t had a crew that said discrimination was a thing of past; it had a future that said we were not all annihilated by nuclear holocaust; it had an economy that was driven by progress and achievement, not simple wealth accumulation; it had science as a guiding force, not mysticism or superstition; it had technology as a means to explore, not just make life easier; and, perhaps most importantly, it had a peaceful mission at its core, not one of conquest. The show screamed peace in a time of war.

Oh to live in such a world! I hear NBC is now contemplating a show called Ark Trek… Something about saving a bunch of animals on a big boat during a flood, appeasing some angry superhero, powerful guy with a white beard, and killing a bunch of other tribes that don’t believe in angry, whitebeard superhero guy, but instead try to appease an angry, superhero guy with a mustache, and another which tries to appease an angry guy with a mowhawk, and… Well you get the idea. Word is the women in the show are very obedient and there’s no hot, man on man action. I suppose times have really changed and with them the tastes of the viewing public.